Both climate-change contrarians and the most highly regarded scientists agree that humans don’t have a precise understanding of how global warming will impact everyday living in the next few decades.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination for secretary of state, ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, is among the high-profile voices who have espoused the idea that climate change will be manageable. They downplay scientists who warn of catastrophic effects from Earth’s rising temperatures, insisting that new technologies and good planning are better than what they see as unreasonable laws based on less than rock-solid long-term projections from climate researchers.

“At ExxonMobil, we share the view that the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action. In our industry, the best hope for the future is to enable and encourage long-term investments in both proven and new technologies while supporting effective policies,” Tillerson told an audience at the 37th annual Oil & Money Conference in London in October.

In their own bid to overcome skeptics’ doubts and, more importantly, get the public to care more about global warming, climate scientists are increasingly trying to quantify economic and health impacts for specific regions in shorter time frames — from the likelihood of drought in the Southwestern United States to the projected frequency of coastal flooding in Florida to anticipated drops in seasonal salmon catches along the Pacific coast.

As many Republican officials, business groups and others continue to question how much human activity is influencing climate change, the majority of scientists are ramping up attempts to provide these more localized, near-term risk assessments to help inform policy-making for everyone from lawmakers and water managers to firefighters and average residents.

“I think the main challenge for the science now are these two questions of how much and how fast,” said Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who is pioneering work in near-term climate predictions.

“Now you want to know, for example, what’s the risk of the Sierra snow pack going down by a certain amount by a certain time,” he added.

This type of forecasting is dauntingly difficult, and scientists face the prospect of making predictions that could be proven wrong within their lifetimes — potentially providing more fodder for skeptics of the science community’s ability to accurately understand such issues.

One of the leading questioners is climatologist Judith Curry, who accepts that Earth is warming but isn’t sure of the links between human activity and climate change. She’s incredulous about whether scientists can make any meaningful connections about global warming and weather-driven disasters.

“It becomes voodoo once you start trying to attribute regional extreme-weather events to climate change,” said Curry, a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “When it gets down to regional extreme events, like droughts in California or hurricane landfalls in Florida or wildfires in Canada, then it becomes compounded by the fact that you need hundreds of years of data to really make sense of the statistics.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the predominant body of scientists analyzing global warming, has found it “extremely likely” that humans have caused most of the warming during the past half-century.

In its most recent report, issued in 2014, the panel included for the first time a risk assessment section that tried to broadly anticipate long-term regional impacts from climate change as well as quantify societies’ ability to adapt to those effects. Topping the list of concerns in North America were a generally increased chance of wildfires, flooding and heat-related deaths.

Beyond forming these generalized assessments that are usually pegged for decades from now, scientists have made strides in comprehending the links between planetary warming and specific disasters.

“We’re now getting better at saying what the influence of climate change was or was not for that event,” said Richard Somerville, professor emeritus of atmospheric science and climate at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “You can’t often say this would have never happened except for climate change, but you can easily say climate change has made this more severe.”

Still, extracting the fingerprints of climate change from a particular event isn’t the same as predicting how often such an event will occur over the next decade or two. Such predictions have most frequently focused on large timescales.

For example, a report published this fall in Science Advances found that climate change could likely trigger a mega drought in the Southwest by the end of the century.

Another report published around the same time in the journal Science found that large swaths of the Mediterranean could turn to desert over the next hundred years if warming isn’t limited to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

So while the majority of scientists are calling for urgent action because they believe the world is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, it remains tough for them to predict exactly how and where the next related instance of extreme weather might occur.

A report published in August in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences said climate models don’t easily downscale to the local level. The study found that temperature predictions for regions the size of the Midwest, for example, quickly become unreliable at the scale of a city the size of Indianapolis or Pittsburgh. And shifts in precipitation were even harder to predict, becoming unreliable for regions smaller than about 1,200 miles across, the report’s authors wrote.

“The real scientific debate at this point is not about if but about where, when and how bad,” said Michael Mann, co-author of the report and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

“A similar story holds for Atlantic hurricanes,” he added. “We expect that they will grow stronger and more intense because of warming oceans, but will we get more or fewer land-falling hurricanes? The science, again, is uncertain there.”

Achieving that level of near-term specificity is what scientists like Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are pursuing — or at least they’re trying to establish the foundation for that capacity.

This summer, he and other researchers published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that predicted average temperatures in the tropical Pacific for 2015 to 2019. The study, one of the first of its kind, forecast a transition from a cooling to a warming phase that would impact precipitation patterns in several specific locations.

If valid, the findings could be a breakthrough for near-term science about climate change. But if wrong, they could be somewhat professionally embarrassing for Meehl and his colleagues — and perhaps worse if skeptics of global warming point to them as evidence of shaky science.

The emerging field of near-term climate prediction is particularly tricky because, similar to localized weather forecasts for beyond a week out, it involves myriad factors that are prone to change as they interact with one another. And some of those elements are essentially still mysteries to scientists.

“It’s controversial because if you’re publishing something that’s going to verify in the next few years, you’re putting your neck on the line,” Meehl said. “But this is where we’re at. We’re trying to push our field right now and see where our capabilities lie.”

RELATED

Gov. Jerry Brown and other top officials in California say they're ready for a major clash with President-elect Donald Trump in the battle over global warming.

Gov. Jerry Brown and other top officials in California say they're ready for a major clash with President-elect Donald Trump in the battle over global warming.